Do Amazon Basics Golf Balls Survive Sim Use? Not at 115 MPH

If you have a high swing speed and you're planning to hit Amazon Basics golf balls into your simulator, watch out — because they don't hold up.

After seeing a run of surprisingly favorable reviews online, we grabbed a batch of Amazon Basics Core Soft golf balls and figured we'd put them through their paces on the sim. What better place to test durability than a full 18-hole round in a home golf setup?

The round took place over at a brother's house, running a SkyTrak ST+ Max, a Carl's HotShot mat, and a BenQ 1080p projector — a solid, real-world garage golf configuration.

Amazon Basics Core Soft Golf Balls

Carl's HotShot Golf Mat

The Round That Broke Two Balls

Across a single 18-hole round, the results were pretty telling. One player — hitting with a high swing speed, courtesy of a guest who plays hard — managed to crack open two of these Amazon Basics balls in the span of the round.

That's not a promising sign for anyone who plans to hammer driver after driver in a simulator session. Repeated high-speed impacts are exactly what a sim ball has to survive, and these came apart under the pressure.

Mike, in the course of one 18-hole round, busted two of these Amazon golf balls.

The Speed Range Test

The lower-speed player in the round couldn't crack a single one — which points to the real culprit here: swing speed. The failures showed up when driver impacts climbed to around 115 MPH or higher.

To confirm it wasn't a fluke, we headed to the SkyTrak speed training range and swung driver as hard as possible, trying to replicate the failure on command. If you're a hard swinger, the takeaway is clear: these balls are living dangerously in a sim environment.